Features
Inflection point? Exploring the contemporary purpose of an international education By James MacDonald
I
nternational schools may be at an inflection point. When the first modern international schools were founded in 1924, there was an aspirational aim to promote peace between nations by fostering an understanding of people and cultures from other countries. But that was nearly 100 years ago. So what’s the purpose of international schools today? I don’t pretend to have the answer to that question, but I hope to explore the topic in a series of articles in this magazine. In this first article, I will explore how international schools arrived at where they are now and why their current position may be indicative of an inflection point. Over the past three decades, the growth of international schools has been remarkable. Various sources estimate at least a tenfold increase in ‘international schools’ since the year 2000. Of course, we have to be slightly careful with the data because much depends on the categorisation of ‘international schools’. For example, a small, ‘international’ English-language kindergarten in a rural area can count the same on those lists as a large, traditional, city-based K-12 international school. But the point remains the same: international education, and the demand for it, has grown significantly. In fact, if we do the math there is probably more than one new international school on average popping up somewhere around the world every week. The growth has not been uniform, 4 | International School | Summer 2022
however, and when considering the question of the purpose of international education, the type of school matters.
Corporate school groups are consolidating the international education industry by purchasing individual, privatelyowned schools. Traditional international schools The origin stories of many traditional international schools follow a similar arc: a small group of expatriates in a country desire an educational option, usually in English, for their own children. Starting a school had generally been the only viable educational option for their children (often for reasons of language), thus such schools were founded out of necessity. To illustrate the pattern, I can draw on my experience of having worked for three traditional international schools. Yokohama International School was founded in 1924 by local European parents and was first housed in the local YMCA. From there, I moved to the New International School of Thailand (NIST) in Bangkok, where a group of parents working for the United Nations had decided to found a new notfor-profit school in 1992. They did that
when the International School of Bangkok moved to the outskirts of the city and left behind a vacant campus. Incidentally, NIST’s founders embraced ideals of the UN charter while also setting fees lower than those of IS Bangkok and in line with the educational tuition allowance of the UN at the time: a good example of market realities and idealism blending together. In my current setting at the International School of Brussels, local American parents banded together in post-war Belgium to found a school in 1952. Today, all three schools continue to run as not-for-profit institutions with parent-led governing bodies. Despite their very different locations, the schools have remarkably similar origin stories – the same story as that of most international schools in the first 70 years of such institutions. But the chronicle of NIST seems to be one of the last iterations of the story. Few, if any, major not-for-profit international schools have been founded since then. In the 1990s, international education started taking off, fuelled not by expatriate parents but by an emerging upper-middle class of ‘host country nationals’ seeking an international education for their children. Those schools were not born out of necessity and founded by isolated pockets of parents with no other options, but by entrepreneurs who began to recognise a local market thirsty for the benefits that an international education could provide to local children in an increasingly globalised world.
